Post-Holiday Tip: Use Wine Boxes to Store Ornaments

In a stroke of genius that hit us sometime on New Year's Day, we realized that sitting in our garage were the perfect ornament receptacles. Instead of purchasing one of those special cardboard corrals for our holiday ornament selection, we turned to something we're betting a few of you have on-hand, especially after the holiday season: wine (and beer) boxes.

The cardboard used to separate wine bottles is, wouldn't you know, the perfect size for keeping fragile ornaments in check. For smaller ornaments, utilize beer packaging. Here's an extra tip: to maximize storage, cut the cardboard dividers into halves or thirds, and place another piece of recycled cardboard between each layer. That said, we found that the newer, "shatter-proof" ornaments stacked just fine without having to trim the packaging.

This should come in handy to make sure that all your holiday favorites from this year make it through eleven months of storage in 2011.